Grade conversion - an introduction

Grade conversion can refer to several concepts. In the context of Egracons it refers to grades obtained abroad by exchange students that need to be converted to the grading scale of the home institution for inclusion in the home Transcript of Record.

In Egracons, it therefore always refers to the conversion from grades at another HEI to the own system. Converting your own grades to another grading scale is not supported as Egracons starts from the idea that grade conversion is a responsibility of the home university (the sending HEI) and not of the host university (the receiving institution). Grades obtained abroad will only become official if they are recognised by the home university where they become part of the curriculum of the degree that the student wants to obtain there.

Grades also refer to individual marks obtained for course units or modules as they are listed in the Learning Agreement and the Transcript of Records. Typically, it is the smallest unit to which (ECTS) credits are officially allocated. Clusters of various units that are allocated a fixed number of credits as a whole, therefore recive one final grade that corresponds to this number of credits.

The Egracons project also mapped grading practices in countries and individual institutions leading to a full description of the grading systems in use in Europe. Its main aim, however, was to develop an online, web-based tool that allows the direct and automatic conversions of grades on the basis of annual, statistically-based grading tables supplied by individual institutions as an excerpt of their overall (student grade) database. Click here for detailed instructions on how to construct a Grading Table, how to fill in the Grading Table templates. The tool can be freely used provided an HEI has submitted its grading tables to the system and after individual registration for the tool by the user at https://tool.egracons.eu

The Egracons project aggregates degree programmes (of the same cycle, so there are separate grading tables for Bachelors and Masters) under the same ISCED study field codes to make up one single reference group. Please note that the new 2013 ISCED codes are used. The choice of this aggregation criterion is critical because, in order to make the conversions simpler, it should be uniformly applied by HEIs of each country (or educational system of a region). This makes it possible to have a one-to-one correspondence between reference groups of different countries. Grading tables based on individual degree programmes, or even worse, individual course units, do not offer this correspondence, as they cannot be readily compared and may be too dependent on the grading behaviour of individual professors. If so desired, institutions can, however, opt for a wider reference group, provided they still include the full list of BA and MA degrees.

Following the recommendations of UNESCO, the Egracons conversion tool will link degrees to ISCED codes. The ISCED fields of Education and training are used by UNESCO/Eurostat/OECD to classify degrees into disciplines. A new classification was agreed upon in 2013 by Unesco. The ISCED-2013 F classification comprises about 80 fields of education (detailed level = four digits). The detailed fields (the third hierarchical level of the classification) are intended mainly for use at the tertiary level of education (see manual). If you want to code at a higher level, one or two digits ‘8’ are added. In this way 4 digits can be used at all times.

This project has been funded by the European Commission DG EAC through the Lifelong Learning Programme. This website reflects the views only of the authors, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.